Reviews

One of the wonderful things about 8-bit games is the fact that people were making up game mechanics on the go, and had to somehow shoehorn a plot into whatever crazy idea they thought might make a good game. This game is a bit of a case in point.

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Right, so I fired up my tape drive, and up next, we seemed to be loading “NOU”. The only thing I could think of was the word “Nougat”. Had Cascade somehow contrived to create a game based on confectionery? It was one hell of a long tape load, so I was expecting greatness. Oh, Cascade how you taunt me with omens of goodness!

Well, here was what loaded up:

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Judging from the main menu, Psion attack doesn’t know whether it’s called Psion Attack or Zion Attack, but I’m pretty sure it wants to be called Cylon Attack and they changed the name to avoid getting sued, because the one thing that looks like a sprite looks like one of those cylon things from Battlestar Galactica.

Personally, I would have liked it to be called Zion Attack, because that would be topical and potentially edgy, although I suppose now “The Matrix” has poisoned that particular well.

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Alright! This was the first true stinker that I’ve encountered! This is a one-button game where you have to hit the space bar before a random number generator decides that a planet has blown up. If enough fuel has been loaded before you hit space, your rocket flies off the top of the screen. I’m guessing that this game could randomly kill you at any point.

As you can see, I turned it off pretty quickly, as it’s barely even a game! Ah, well, this is the beauty of the Cascade Cassette 50!

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Hi everyone! Here’s a video of me playing number 2, GALACTIC ATTACK! This is a good game! If there are more like this, I’ll have to revise my assessment of the Cascade tape. I originally played the C64 version, which was *alright*, but it could be that as the games were apparently bought from the public via magazine adverts, the BBC version is a little better, as BBC owners tended to be a bit more technical, perhaps?

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I got this game on one of a set of floppies which came with a BBC B that I bought a while ago. Now, I appreciate that the title screen says “Bandit” and that there is no record anywhere online of a game called “Cowboy Bandits”, but in homage to the person who created the boot menu for that floppy, I’m reviewing it as such. Sadly, Acornsoft does not agree with my appellation:

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I'm sure lots of you out there remember the excellent DOS game Sleuth, which was written by Eric N. Miller in the 1980s. I absolutely loved it, and still play it at Christmas with the family. Unfortunately, it requires an emulator to run nowadays, which can be a bit fiddly.